Very simply put: Ameren UE is incompetent. For the second time in five months hundreds of thousands of St. Louis area residents are without power and Ameren is hoping to have them restored within days. Temperatures are predicted to be below freezing for the next week or so, and we're supposed to get more snow on Wednesday... just in time for power to go out again!
The storm two days ago wasn't mammoth... our area received about five inches of snow over the course of 36 hours. There weren't strong winds like in the July storm, and also unlike last time this storm was predicted for a week in advance. Gateway Pundit says that Ameren is claiming that this was the worst ice storm in St. Louis history, but they're hardly unbiased. Here's a map of the power outages... notice that the map is almost useless because it shows the number of customers without power in each region rather than the percentage of customers without power.
There is absolutely no excuse for Ameren UE to fail its customers during both the hottest and the coldest weeks of the year. I don't know any details, but I'm sure there's political corruption involved behind the appearance of industrial incompetence, and I want heads. Here's how it should work: first, we publically excoriate the management of Ameren UE; second, we indict the first politicians to jump on the bandwagon and call for investigations.
